


Up Close, Personal

by themegalosaurus



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Gen, Mark of Cain, Season/Series 10, Sexual Harassment, Situational Humiliation, Strippers & Strip Clubs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-11
Updated: 2018-06-11
Packaged: 2019-05-20 23:19:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14904090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themegalosaurus/pseuds/themegalosaurus
Summary: ‘Dude, the last lap dance you had was at Christmas. It was a gift paid for by me. You spent the entire song trying to convince the girl that she should go to nursing school.’





	Up Close, Personal

**Author's Note:**

> A belated coda to episode 13x05, 'Advanced Thanatology'. I saw a post on Tumblr somewhere suggesting that the most likely Christmas for this event to have taken place was during season 10, which made me wonder what that might have been like.

“Come on, Sammy,” Dean says. “I’ll buy you a dance.”

Sam can’t tell whether Dean is serious. Surely it’s a joke. Not quite surely. He smiles, carefully bland.

“That’s my boy,” says Dean, and waves a girl over, easy and imperious, shuffles bills into her hand. “Treat my baby brother good,” he says. “He doesn’t get out much.”

Sam is grateful for the blue lights of the club to hide his embarrassment. How does Dean have this ability, still, to boil him back down to fourteen years old, awkward and skinny and apologetic?

The woman smiles, raises an eyebrow at Sam and squares up to him confidently. Her hair is long and dark, curled into glossy waves. There’s a thick layer of silver glitter around her eyes.

When Dean was dying - the year Dean went to hell - he and Sam exchanged gas station gifts in a Washington motel. Sam bought Dean motor oil and a candy bar. Dean bought Sam shaving foam and a sheaf of girlie magazines. Sam looked at them, laughed at them and shoved them down into the depths of his duffel, where they grew steadily more ragged until he turned them out a year and a half later. That was in Oklahoma, where he’d burned his IDs and spent a week working a bar job while the apocalypse set in.

Sam likes sex, has liked sex; that’s not the issue. There’s just something about Dean’s easy exhibitionism, the porn consumption and the public hookups and the threesomes and the strippers, yeah, which he’s never been able to share. He can never attain the requisite lack of self-consciousness. Dean’s proximity doesn’t help. Sam can’t help but feel like he’s doing it wrong (it, anything, whatever). Ordinarily, he would have refused to come to this club, but it’s deepest December and Sam’s been spinning his wheels for months, the Mark on Dean’s arm doing God knows what to his brother’s head. He’d wanted a regular night out, just one. Surely sometimes it’s okay to do what it takes to get an easy life.

The woman steps her legs wide and slides forward across Sam’s thighs. “Merry Christmas,” Dean mouths, grinning over her shoulder. The lights flick to red behind him, and Sam’s heart lurches. Dean, outlined in a darkened doorway. The long, quiet corridors of the bunker. The flash of a hammer.

Then the lights shift again, purple-blue, and the music changes. The woman places a hand on his shoulder. Sam tenses; breathes through it, tries to relax. She starts to move.

He could just sit there quietly for the whole song and it would be over. He doesn’t need to do anything. He’s just… here. That’s how this works. But, “Come on, man,” Dean says. “Show her you’re into it. Poor girl’s going to think she’s done something wrong.”

She looks around at him then, looks back to Sam; frowns microscopically. “I’m good, sugar,” she says. Sam isn’t sure which of them she’s talking to. He settles himself on the chair, tilting his head upward. He tries to look enthusiastic.

The clothes that she’s wearing approximate a nurse’s outfit, short and shiny with long white stockings. Jess was wearing something very similar the last time they went out together, a Halloween night before Dean broke in. This girl looks nothing like her. But the memory’s uncomfortable, jarring. Sam’s brain flashes onto Jess’s thighs, her breasts, her smiling face; he feels a flicker of arousal and then the queasy wash of self-disgust. Yep. There it is.

A scraping sound, Dean’s chair edging closer.

Trawling local newspapers not long after he got Dean back, Sam found blurry CCTV footage of a fight in a strip-joint, ‘Have you seen this man?’ A security guard had been beaten so bad that he still hadn’t woken up, two weeks later. “He was just looking out for me,” one of the dancers was reported as saying. “This guy was getting handsy and Pete had to step in. I can’t believe…”

Sam doesn’t want a fight, not this evening. He looks into the woman’s eyes. He should say something. Dean’s watching.

“So, uh,” Sam says, “you ever think of, uh, nursing? For real, I mean?”

Jesus.

She grins at him. “You asking?”

“No, no–”

Laughing now, she tells him, “Sponge baths are my speciality.”

“Sorry,” Sam says. “I didn’t mean,” and she shakes her head.

“I’m kidding.”

“Hey,” Dean says abruptly. “I paid money for this.”

The girl flickers a glance back over her shoulder, rolls her eyes. She grips her hands around the back of Sam’s chair, leans over. Body glitter shimmers on her breasts. She rolls her hips, pushes forward towards him. He can smell her, scent and sweat together. She’s good-looking, it’s not that. It’s the weight of Dean’s eyes on him, the strained sense of balancing on a sharp-topped fence, the awareness that one misstep could send the whole evening falling into disaster.

The girl is toned, fit, in better shape than most of the women Sam’s been with. You can see the anatomy underneath her skin, the muscles shifting as she moves.

Sam’s ears are ringing. Suddenly the face of the woman dancing appears, close to his own, glittering. “You okay, honey?”

He pulls his mouth tight, into a smile. “I’m fine.” She’s kind. She probably would make a decent nurse.

“Okay.”

She turns around, white latex mini dress stretched tight over her ass, her hips gyrating. Sam steals a glance at Dean’s face. He’s watching her now, the dancer, his eyes ranging appreciatively over her body as she unzips the dress, shrugs it off like a jacket to reveal her stockings and lingerie. She’s dancing for Dean, Sam realises, just staying close enough that she can maintain the pretence that it’s for him. That’s good. That makes sense. A swish of hair and the girl looks back to him, winks. Collusion.

Dean frowns, clears his throat. “Sammy loves nurses,” says Dean. “He drank one, once.”

Sam blinks. Did Dean even know about that? There’s a buzz across the front of his brain and when it dissipates Dean’s back to looking up at the woman. He’s flipping a ten-dollar note through his fingers, through and through and through. There’s a sulphuric burn at the back of Sam’s throat and the lights in the club are pulsing. It’s disorientating. Sam’s not quite sure.

The atmosphere shifts and it takes Sam a moment to realise what’s happened; the music’s changed. The song’s over. It’s done.

The stripper steps carefully away, legs wide, bending over to pick up her dress. Dean runs a hand over the curve of her ass. A quick shiver of horror runs over Sam’s skin as she tenses, steps back. He should do something. Shit. He should. He doesn’t move.

There’s a long slow pulse of nothing, the dead beat of danger. Sam can’t meet her eyes. Then she shakes her head, defusing, and relief breaks over him like water. “Right,” she says. “Thanks, boys,” and hurries away.

Dean bursts out laughing. “Happy Christmas, nerd,” he says again. He punches Sam on his fucked-up shoulder and it twinges right down to the elbow.

Sam tells him, “Thanks.”

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoyed this fic you can also find and share it [on Tumblr](http://themegalosaurus.tumblr.com/post/174696743023). I always appreciate your comments!


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